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Parallels Beta Adds Boot Camp, Desktop
Verunks writes "Parallels has released a new beta of its virtualization product for Mac OS X. This new release includes one major new feature, something Parallels calls Coherency: "Shows Windows applications as if they were Mac ones. Try it and enjoy best of both worlds truly at the same time. No more switching between Windows to Mac OS." Check out this Screenshot"
More interesting to me is the Boot Camp support so you can have a single partition to run IE7 in Parallels to test compatibility of a website but reboot to play video games that need a little more juice.
The constant improvement that this product has seen in its short existence is astounding. When you consider that it costs only $80 and has no competition at this time, it almost seems like they're working too hard on it.
If Parallels was publicly traded, I'd be buying up a lot of their stock. These features are too damned useful for Apple to not add to OS X at some point, and the best way would be for them to just whip out the checkbook and buy the company.
Actually, with modern multi-core processors and oodles of RAM, virtualization kicks pretty much ass. When I run parallels in fullscreen mode on my macbook, you pretty much can't tell it's virtualized. It's more responsive than the dell desktop sitting in my office at work. The only thing you really notice is that the video card doesn't support hardware acceleration, so stuff like games suck. Then again, the video card in my macbook is pretty crappy, so even with 3d support they would suck =/
What do you call "non-native support for Linux"?! Apple laptops run linux _as natively as it goes_ for ages and this doesn't exclude the Intel based machines. I even could setup a triple-boot on an Intel based Mac (vs. all the dual-boots I had in the past). All running "natively" of course
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
I've installed it and it is very similar to Classic on PPC macs under OS X. As with OS 9 apps on OS X, a full copy of the operating system is running, but the windows are drawn directly to the desktop (or at least appear to, with some glitching at the moment). I have the Windows task bar running down the left hand side of my screen so it doesn't get in the way of my dock (at the bottom) and desktop icons (to the right). Running Windows with the classic theme looks better as the shaped edges of Windows apps leave a little triangle of the Windows desktop which looks a bit poor. Lighten up the theme and it works quite nicely on the OS X desktop.
:-)
Apple really needs to buy Parallels or do something similar. It would make a huge difference to people moving from Windows to the Mac and eventually, Windows could go the same way as Classic MacOS has under OS X and just fade away. I don't think MS would be very pleased with this development though
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
This is really good for Parallels and will be important for the company in several ways.
Obviously it is a big feature for users who might be interested in Boot Camp and Parallels. One license, keeping the same settings etc.
The thing that will bring the real benefits to Parallels though are related to development. Working with Boot Camp means that Parallels can access the Boot Camp drivers for Windows that Apple writes. Every time Apple updates their hardware they'll update Boot Camp with new drivers. This will make it much easier for Parallels to keep up with new hardware.
Boot Camp adds a driver for the touchpad that includes Apple's right click implementation. Suddenly it's in Parallels automagically. Apple ads a driver to operate the inbuilt iSight. Parallels can start using it too.
Shared documents are potentially great. Apple should work with Parallels to ensure things like the iTunes library (and iTS purchased music) is available in the Windows partition.
Apple have already said that they are not going to include virtualisation in Leopard because they are so happy with the performance of Parallels.
If necessary they'd buy Parallels to ensure that development keeps going on. They might do it anyway to reduce the costs.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe